🌎Dear earthlings,
The transition to a regenerative, healing and collective system won’t be easy. But change IS coming. During these intense days of bad news remember: this system has been in place for thousands of years, it will take courage and determination to overthrow it.
This Week in Climate News:
⚖️ Friends of Earth & Client Earth win ruling against UK government.
🌡️ London breaks historical heat record at 40°C whilst Rishi Sunak (Tory leadership contender) pledges to maintain ban on onshore wind farms…
🔥Wildfires ravage France, UK, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany and Greece (basically most of Europe.)
⚠️ Humanity faces ‘collective suicide’ over climate crisis, warns UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
⚰️ Heatwave death toll in Europe rises to 4,500 (yet it’s nowhere on mainstream news?)
📈 Cool Trends:
🌈 Sumak Kawsay
Indigenous Andean communities follow a life philosophy or “cosmovision” called Sumak Kawsay. The philosophy is rooted in the ideals of community, reciprocity and harmony with other people and nature—providing an epistemological alternative to our current extractionist system of thought.
It translates to:
Sumak: fulfilled, beautiful, splending and excellent
Kawsay: life, existence, culture, cosmos
Since 2008 Ecuador and Bolivia changed their constitutions to include Sumak Kawsay as the guiding philosophy for state action.
What has happened since then?
Ecuador and Bolivia become first counties in the world to grant constitutional rights to nature.
In 2009 Bolivia led the UN General Assembly to proclaim April 22nd as ‘International Mother Earth Day’,
In 2012 Bolivia authorized the creation of new institutions:
Mother Earth Advocacy Group: to protect and oversee that the rights of nature are protected.
The Plurinational Mother Earth Authority: which oversees climate change policies.
In 2021 a landmark ruling by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court applied the “Rights of Nature” to safeguard the Los Cedros cloud forest from mining concessions.
💧Water Lily
Camping? Adventuring? Mountaineering? Meet water lily, the portable turbine that can be transformed into a wind turbine too! Harvest energy anywhere.
💩 WTF? news
🌏 The Culture Club
📺 What we’re watching: How to Change Your Mind, series
🎧 What we’re listening to: For The Wild Podcast on Plant Intelligence
👁 Profile of the week: @seaspiracy
🤯 Crazy fact we learnt this week: plant intelligence: nature can communicate with humans.